Buncan settled himself as comfortably as he could on the padded wooden seat. They were on their way! This must be how his father used to feel when starting off on one of his inimitable adventures. Though if he and Clothahump were right there wouldn’t be any adventure. Just a lot of hard, difficult traveling.
At least it was a. journey. At his age that was adventure enough in itself. Everything they saw from now on would be new and different from everything which had been seen before, and therefore exciting. Different if not startling, stimulating if not overawing.
From their excited chatter behind him he could tell that Squill and Neena felt the same way. With the three of them working together he was confident there was nothing they couldn’t handle, no obstacle they could fail to overcome.
This was a common enough feeling among young men his age, so he could hardly be faulted for thinking like an idiot.
“Drive on, Gragelouth! We’ll find this Grand Veritable, if it exists, and toss it in your wagon like any other piece of goods. Maybe it’ll be worth a few gold pieces.”
“All things are possible to those whom life has not yet disenchanted,” the merchant murmured condescendingly without looking up from his team. “You are not afraid, then?”
“Afraid? Of what?”
“Of meeting Juh Phit’s fate; Of horrors and obstacles unknown yet to be overcome. Of what the Grand Veritable itself may be or be capable of.”
“It’s only a thing,” Buncan replied manfully. “I’ve never yet encountered a thing worth fearing. Besides,” he finished aiMfy as he crossed his legs and leaned back, “if it gives us any trouble we’ll just spellsing it away.”
“Bloody right, mate!” Squill barked belligerently behind nun. “We’ll conjure the bleedin’ wotever it is back into thin air! We can do oversize ‘ammers. Why not a Grand Veritable?”
“Whatever it is indeed,” murmured Gragelouth. “We may hope to survive long enough to find out.”
From the undergrowth several pairs of eyes watched the wagon disappear over the next rise in the road. Their owners were exhausted and battered, scratched and torn from their wild flight through the brush, worn out from avoiding the crush of the thaumaturgical hammer. Some studied that apparition warily where it rested high up in the trees. It had not moved for some tune, but where the necromantic arts were concerned nothing, absolutely nothing, could be taken for granted.
“Pulp their eyes!” chattered a ringtail. “Who knew the interfering ones were spellsingers?”
“None could have foreseen it,” insisted the coati who led them. His eyes flashed almost as brightly as the diamond in his left canine. “Children! Are you all to be put to flight by children?”
“Not me,” said another ringtail. “Not by cubs of any species.”
One of the assembled raccoons spoke up. “Sorcery invoked by children is still sorcery, and any sensible person fears that.”
“They were lucky, that’s all.” The coati gestured toward the hanging hammer. “Did you not see how after putting us to flight it turned on its conjurers and tried to kill them? They are inexperienced and callow.”
“I’m not interested in what it did after it tried to kill us,” growled another raccoon. “I saw what it did to poor Jachay. He was my friend. Now he’s a smear on the ground.”
“Aye,” said a ringtail. “That’s sorcery of a kind I’ve no desire to encounter again. Certainly not for what poor swag a humble merchant’s wagon might contain.”
The coati raged among his followers. “They caught us by surprise, that’s all! A little stealth, a little planning next time, arid we’ll take them before they can sing up so much as a blue wasp!” His voice dropped ominously. “Hard to spellsing with your throat cut.”
“And if we fail?” the ringtail wanted to know. “What then? Will assurances and excuses deliver us?”
“Me, I’m not going to chance finding out.” Hefting his war ax, one of the reluctant raccoons turned and stalked off toward the road, not in pursuit of the vanished wagon but south, toward Lynchbany.
“Go then, Wrochek!” the coati yelled after him. “Flee to the safety of a Thieves’ Hall and a protected bed.”
“Sounds good to me,” confessed one of the ringtails. He promptly broke into a trot to catch up with the raccoon.
Their impudent departure started a minor rush. Even the spectacled bear lumbered off to join his defecting friends.
“Even you, Sinwahh, put to flight by infants!” The coati’s sneers trailed them remorselessly. “All of you ‘brave’ robbers, terrified by three cubs and some strange music. Cowards, weaklings! Offspring of discount whores! You’ll not share in our bounty!”
“Is there any bounty, o revered leader Charming?” The one raccoon who’d stayed behind was uncertain.
“Aye,” wondered the ringtail who’d remained. “The sloth looked like nothing but a simple merchant.”
The coati turned violently on his small constituency, all that remained of his once powerful band. “You believe that? Then you’re no better than those spineless fools who’ve fled. What ‘simple merchant’ merits rescue by three spellsingers, even young ones? Do you imagine that the newcomers risked their lives out of the goodness of their hearts, or from some imagined debt to the trader?” He spun ‘round to glare at the northern stretch of now empty road.
“There’s mote at stake here than pots and pans. There’s something in that wagon worth dying for. A lifetime’s savings in gold, perhaps, or precious stones garnered in Glittergeist trade. Or something even more valuable we cannot imagine. Something worm the concern of young wizards.” He turned back to his two anxious companions.
“You are right, Sisarfi. That wagon is not worth the attention of common thieves. But I am not common, and by cleaving to me and my leadership you bask in the glory of my uncommonness.”
“Uh, thanks.” Though obviously confused, the ringtail instinctively sensed it would be impolitic to seek further clarification. He rubbed at the place on his head where his left ear used to be. It had been sacrificed many years before in a badly bollixed attempt at robbing a riverboat.
“Those fools.” Chamung turned his gaze to the road leading south. “They’ll find no profit in Lynchbany. They’ll starve. It’s a town overrun with thieves, and half of them don’t even have Guild cards. All profit entails some risk, and we’re not afraid of a little risk, are we? Come!” He stalked determinedly toward the road, aiming north. “We’ll have our profit, and revenge for our poor brother Jachay as well! Already my mind ferments with provocative scenarios for entertaining disembowelments.”
The ringtail and raccoon exchanged a distinctly hesitant look before following.
CHAPTER 7
The wagon wound its way through the bellwoods until a barely visible leftward branching in the road that Buncan would not even have guessed was there drew Gragelouth to the west. As their new route was not merely less traveled but practically nonexistent, their progress was slow. The terrain remained relatively level and firm.
The Bellwoods did not so much meld into the Moors as give way abruptly. One moment they were traveling among healthy oaks and sycamores, belltrees and glissando bushes, accompanied by the singing of crywail lizards and the hum of insects, and the next found them passing between cinder-gray groves and the inert hulks of long-dead trees.
These quickly surrendered the soil to an astonishingly fecund and fevered forest of giant mushrooms, toadstools, and shelf fungi, an overgrown morass of macabre mycelium that throbbed with an unwholesome internal phosphorescence. The cloud-flecked blue sky of the Bellwoods had been obliterated by a pervasive gray-green gloom that disheartened the soul as well as the eye.
Somewhere above the pestilent fog Buncan knew that the sun still shone brightly, the clouds still collided and coalesced amiably in a blue sea. It was vital to cling to that image as they plodded through the baleful olive-green twilight.